So, how does everyone duplicate their tapes?!

-Boom box?
-Professional duplicator?
-Duplication company?

I dubbed my first two Blanket Truth tapes on a boombox, but it took foreverrrrrr to make 100 (50 each).

So I invested in an old professional duplicator, made by Recordex. I spent $100 and then put a decent amount of money into it for repairs and it still didn't work right. If you got a copy of the Ukulele & So Can I tape, you can see that the duplication was a little wonky. Since then, it's been sitting in a corner of my living room.

A few months later, I try to take another stab at a professional duplicator. The easy thing to do would be to outsource the music and have a professional COMPANY duplicate the tapes, but i'm too stubborn for that. So I purchased a TelexACC4000, spent $400 on it. It was never used, but has been sitting in a box since 1997. Well, something happened over time and the thing dubbed tapes with all the music in the left channel on side a and all in the right channel for side b. So weird. I am just finishing up returning the duplicator.

Tried taking that duplicator to be fixed but after 6 WEEKS!!!!!! the repairman told me he wouldn't be able to fix it. Apparently some wire got messed up that is irreplaceable nowadays. The machine is great though! I'm very tempted to take the money I'm getting back and put it right into a different ACC4000.

in short, what does everyone else use?!

We use boomboxes too and were wondering how other tapes label do... In France, finding tapes is a real problem so finding professionnal recorders may be quite impossible!!!

But we link several boomboxes together so as to record several tapes in once... You record yuor tapes tape by tape??

I have a set up where I use an old Numark mixing board and play the master into it and then output to three Technics tape decks (with input level monitoring, etc) using the three stero outputs Master/Zone1/Zone2 and adjust levels and monitor with headphones at the board and on the decks as needed until the sound is right.

Then your input could be anything you can plug into the board (doesn't have to be a tape like with a dup machine) ; could be a computer, if you used that or plug a four track machine in, or minidisc, etc.

Anyone else have any set-ups like this?

I can take some pics of the set up for anyone interested.

Actually I love looking any home recording set-ups and seeing how people creatively make things happen or wonderfully.

We should start a new thread of our set-ups.

by the way, HI all, nice to meet you !!!
john
cass_et_tape_records

Yes, I would be interesgted by photos of the set-up (cause since I don't speak perfect english, I haven't understand everything) ;p

Sure thing (I am super busy until this weekend, I'll post some then)

okay, here we go

The basic idea for duplication is that the mixing board has three stereo outputs (not including the headphone output jack)

and the input could just be from any channel (computer, cd, another tape, DVD, VHS, etc)

My current set-up isn't for mass tape duplication right now, but it is easily changed with a few wires (and grabbing another tape deck to add to the stack)









I'd love to see some other set-ups posted here, or in a new thread.

take care